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She is one of the more elusive writers of the last three decades but Marilynne Robinson has hit the spotlight in glory.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer beat a field originally including Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison to take the £30,000 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Robinson, 65, famously produced a much-lauded debut, Housekeeping, in 1980 only to wait another 24 years for her second novel, Gilead, and a further four for Home, which tells the Gilead story from a different perspective.
Speaking after Home scooped top honours at the Southbank Centre ceremony last night, Robinson heaped praise on the prize for getting people talking about books.
"I'm so grateful," she said. "This is such a wonderful event in such a wonderful institution that has certainly become the most satisfying experience. It gives the most elegant, beautiful platform for women's literature.
"The prizes in the States tend to be older and more ritualised. But there's a sense of mission about this prize. People are very devoted to the quality."
Home tells the story of a preacher whose wayward son Jack returns home to try to make peace. With its background in the Church and deeply-felt issues of morality, it is very unfashionable.
But Robinson said she was prompted to write Home because of the public reaction to the characters in Gilead. "Jack was just very strong in my mind and one of the things I found was people reacted to him in many cases so I felt like defending him." Robinson added: "The public is smarter and much more literary than most publishing houses give them credit for."
The novel was praised by critics and the Sunday Times hailed Robinson as the "world's best writer of prose". Fi Glover, the broadcaster who chaired the judges, said: "Read it and weep." The author added that she was "glad" she had managed to produce three books over the years, despite the lamentations of her admirers that there should have been more.
"If I had never written another novel after Housekeeping I would have been perfectly happy with myself," she said. "I don't feel neglected or anything like that." But for those fans, Robinson offered a glimmer of hope that there would be another book within a few years, although it is not yet seriously under way. "I'm not going to say anything about it. These things wither with the daylight. I only write when I absolutely feel like writing. If you try to do it under other circumstances, it just hurts your feelings."
The £10,000 Orange Prize for New Writers was awarded to Francesca Kay for her novel, An Equal Stillness.
